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To answer this question, I began to trace how this metaphor of movement is deployed in The Emerging Cyberculture in a number of discussions of the impact of technology on literacy.  For instance, in the wide-ranging, theoretically inclined introduction, one encounters comments that beg the question of how else we could think of technology--and literacy--except in terms of movement and motion:

• "Now literacy, not yet recovered from the swapping in of the visual, is being pulled in yet another direction with the nonlinearity, nonsequentiality, and interactivity of several forms of hypertext" (7),
• "For hypertext use, we need to understand, for instance, how to navigate the ‘space’" (8), and
• "The object of hypermedia seems, in fact, to be the creation of work that has movement, change, and ultimately disappearance as its integral qualities. The fixity of print, its motions of closure, and its authority are summoned to account for themselves in the world of electronic literacy. What will be their legacy?" (11).

On one hand, these quotations speak to how the graphical interface of many of the new communications technologies offer us a chance to move through multiple texts, as well as between texts and images--with greater ease and immediacy than ever before. And, as we've seen in the various "movements" of the collection's essays, many of the contributor's figure this movement as progress, as potential, as possibility.

The journey toward/through meaning offered by the emerging cyberculture, then, is one between ever increasing bits of information, prompting perhaps new linkages, new ways of thinking about the information moving around us.  But one also can't help but wonder what metaphorical baggage is packed for this journey.

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| table of contents | opening | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | connections | movement | assumptions | conclusion |